Casnocha Turns Geek

When It's a Chore, It's Not Fun

I've been sporadically giving attention and energy to this project. At the outset my big picture goal was to better understand basic web technologies so I could converse more intelligently with programmers. In the past three months, I have studied mySQL and PHP in the abstract level and genereated very specific, working scripts that accomplished simple tasks. I learned coding vocabularly and syntax; the relationship btwn mysql, apache, and php; how to debug, at a simple level; and so forth.

This evening I opened up by two books, my working scripts, my phpMyAdmin, and started figuring out what to do next. It struck me that I wasn't feeling the flow, and haven't been the past few weeks. The prospect of developing more advanced scripts -- user logins, content management systems, rigorous data integrity tests -- just hasn't been getting me excited. So, I at one point had this goal of developing a 360 degree feedback system so friends could submit their forms online and I could collect and organize efficient....but it doens't seem worth it, because I'm not having a lot of fun. It IS fun to understand the basics, the barebones, and be able to talk intelligently and even look at PHP code, now, and understand its backbone, but it's NOT fun to spend several hours typing in a foreign language, debugging, etc.

I want to spend the final two months efficiently and ensure that I'm really dialed in to something that's at once useful and enjoyable. I think this means moving on to another piece of the web 2.0 pie and understanding it at a high level and trying to better understand how all these pieces come together. I don't want to spend the next couple months and develop really snazzy PHP scripts.

User submitting form -- halfway there

still having problems with the form pulling the data from mysql. have a movie.php that i want user to be able to submit info through. i am able to insert rows via phpmyadmin, but not from the user end. that's next thing to figure out.

Companion code with book

Note to self: Next time when I buy a programming book look on the companion web site to download the free code samples that come with the book. This should be helpful....

Debugger integrated w/ script editor

All the debuggers listed at pages like this either cost something or Windows only. i'm looking for a good debugger for Mac OS X that can work with my script editor and/or web server and spit out my PHP bugs on the browser, not just in my Console log. Suggestions are kindly welcomed.

Working with phpMyAdmin, doing SQL queries

I added some tables into my movie database using phpmyadmin and it's much easier than raw code. The book suggests after this chapter that you use phpmyadmin, anyway, so that's good. BUT - they continue to give the SQL syntax as if everything was going to be hardcoded in the PHP script. What you put into phpmyadmin is different than what you put in the PHP script even if it's the same query, right? That's screwing me. Next up is working with some aesthetic elements to put tables around my data, and soon I'll dive into user-submitted form stuff. Console is showing my errors, which is helpful, but I still -- someday -- would like them to show up on the browser-generated page, like it does in the examples in my books. Flipping back to Console is a bit of a pain.